A decade ago, I litigated a trade secret/unfair competition dispute between two large plastics manufacturers. The Plaintiff was based in southwest Florida, the Defendant in southern Alabama. The factual dispute is interesting, though not necessarily particularly pertinent to the subject I want to address in this post.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new data privacy and security law in Europe that will go into force on May 25, 2018. Every organization that does business with EU customers, regardless of the home base of the organization, and regardless of the size of the organization, must come into compliance or risks significant financial penalties and legal exposure. The new law permits fines of the greater of €20 million or four percent of an organization’s worldwide annual revenue for the previous fiscal year.